Facebook, the world-renowned social networking giant has announced early this week that it has acquired Boston based Biometric ID Verification startup Confirm.io. And as per the sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the company will be merged into Facebook as soon as the deal gets completed and all the staff and technology will be rolled onto payrolls of the California based company owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
Technically, Confirm.io offers an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables companies to verify a user’s government-issued ID card- such as the Social Security Number, to authenticate an individual.
Perhaps Facebook is planning to use the same technology to authenticate all its users in near future based on the technology of Confirm.io.
In November last year, media reports emerged saying that Facebook was trying to block fake profiles on its platform by authenticating users.
In developing countries like India, Facebook is already asking Aadhaar details to users willing to create a new account on its platform. May all these security parameters are being implemented to weed out fake Facebook profiles.
Going into the history, Facebook faced allegations for spreading fake news during the US 2016 elections. The company head announced in March 2017 that there were some discrepancies carried out by over 250,000 fake profiles originating from Russia.
CIA and FBI endorsed the findings as true and asked Facebook to start the process of weeding out fake profiles from its platform.
Hence, since then, Facebook has been trying hard by putting a lot of efforts in authenticating its users. From March 2018, Facebook will implement a new security strategy where all Facebook users (individuals) will be asked to upload their latest selfie photo in order to save their accounts from being suspended.
Probably the newly acquired Confirm.io technology will help Facebook in this phase by authenticating its users against their government issued ID cards.
